By: E&P Staff In the aftermath of The New York Times publishing its long-delayed article last night on Sen. John McCain and a certain lobbyist, one aide to McCain charged that the paper had been forced to publish because of a pending article about an internal fight there to be published by The New Republic.
The piece went up on the magazine's site today, written by longtime Times-watcher Gabriel Sherman. The paper's executive editor Bill Keller today stated that the McCain article was published like any other, when it was "ready."
The Sherman story alleges that one of the reporters whose name is on the Times story, Marilyn Thompson, then exited her reporting position and took a job with The Washington Post partly because of her frustration with the piece. She has denied that.
Here is an excerpt from the Sherman article at www.tnr.com. It reviews the process of writing and vetting and holding the piece for more than two months.
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What happened? The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable....
In an email to me on February 19, Keller wrote: "This sounds like a pointless exercise to me--speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that's what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. When we have something to say, we'll say it in the paper."
Late in the day on February 19, Baquet sent a final draft of the Times piece to Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson in New York. After a series of discussions, the three editors decided to publish the investigation. "We published the story when it was ready which is what we always do," Baquet told TNR this morning. He added: "Nothing forced our hand. Nothing pushed us to move faster other than our own natural desire that we wanted to get a story in the paper that met all of our standards."
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